David Cameron is facing all manner of allegations based on suspect evidence, but because the source is a Tory peer many are OK with it.
Photograph: Matt Dunham/AP

So we all now know about David Cameron and the pig. Is this allegation good or bad for the public interest, as distinct from what the public may find mildly amusing? Is it even true? After all, it’s third-hand and uncorroborated.

This once important distinction seems not greatly to matter in the age of ultrafast social media, when “transparency” is the guiding principle, in place of the discretion and secrecy which used to guide so much of public policy and private affairs. Or have we moved at high-speed broadband rates from deplorable coverups to deplorable exposés, often beyond the reach of legal remedy or of the individual privacy which we claim to value?

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Yet now we have Call Me Dave, a Jacobean revenge biography researched and written by Lord Ashcroft, one of the more bizarre figures on the fringes of British public life; the kind of man who would have been shown the door in Britain’s stuffier pre-Loadsamoney era. After all, it was whispering in the pre-Big Bang City that he was too flash which drove the clever Norwich grammar school-educated tycoon to relocate his business empire to Bermuda in 1984, and then later to Belize. He came back (except for tax purposes) as party treasurer and top donor in the William Hague era, labelled by the journalist Peter Oborne as “the man who bought the Tory party”.

If one of the Daily Mail’s own reporters had brought in the Cameron pig’s head story instead of the piqued peer and bully billionaire he or she would have been told not to waste the newsdesk’s time until they’d got their facts right. Ashcroft’s imprimatur gave the Mail’s editor-in-chief the green light to run it and much more about the gilded lifestyle that both fascinates and enrages Mail readers. Paul Dacre has always disliked Cameron as a posh boy and liberal softie (though the Mail supremo sent his own sons to Eton).

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There’s more Call Me Dave revelations in Tuesday’s second Mail instalment, most of it mere detail about things the reading public vaguely already knew: Cameron’s privileged background and Brideshead years at Oxford, his louche friends in the Chipping Norton area (Rebekah Brooks, Jeremy Clarkson and their kind), his casual habits with policy and colleagues, his ability to alarm the military chiefs. As Tuesday’s Guardian also points out, Cameron’s prior knowledge of Ashcroft’s non-dom tax status before it was confirmed in 2010 – here’s what I wrote at the time – is unsettling, though not really surprising. His conduct over Libya and Syria, which so disturbed the top brass, should disturb us too.

But why should we take Ashcroft’s self-published book (he owns Backbite, the imprint) seriously, or trust the “high-level sources” he and co-author, Isabel Oakeshott, claim to have spoken to. Oakeshott was a central figure in the murky exposé of Chris Huhne’s “swapped speeding points” on the M11, courtesy of his estranged wife, Vicky Price. It was another revenge saga, one which put both Huhne and Price in jail. None of the parties inspire much trust, any more than Ashcroft the dealmaker did after he obfuscated over his tax status for years before 2010.

When I asked him about it once over lunch (he paid) Ashcroft memorably replied: “You can ask me about my sex and gender. You can ask whether I have two testicles and a penis. But [on tax] I do not respond.” If only Cameron’s porcine victim (alleged) had been so tight-lipped!

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Ashcroft more or less admits his book is score settling for the job Cameron supposedly promised him but failed to deliver. Oakeshott denies that charge, arguing that publication before 7 May would have done more damage. On the evidence, the Guardian’s Rob Booth is right to suggest it was intended to be an obituary after Cameron’s expected defeat. But is the public interest served by this sort of stuff? Without having read more than extracts, my hunch is that damage to public trust in public figures outweighs any useful light shone on dark corners of either policy or pigs.

At a time when public trust is already low – lower than the facts warrant – this matters. Frustrated voters are tempted by insurgent politicians and parties who attack established leaders in all major democracies – from Trump to Tsipras – even though the insurgents are clearly far shadier or dodgier themselves. I name no names, not today. But we live in a moment of panic over past coverups (some of them real, some imagined) that allows one senior police officer to stand outside the home of a dead prime minister and appeal for victims of his crimes (alleged), while another calls lurid allegations “credible and true”.

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So much for due process, as the ex-director of public prosecutions Lord Macdonald said on Radio 4’s Today programme. We have to find a better balance than this between respect for victims’ rights and those of innocent-until-proven-guilty defendants.

Ashcroft evidently sees himself as a victim too, a victim of posh boy Cameron’s dishonesty. By publishing his book he has made a victim’s statement to the court of public opinion, full of anonymous sources. The Daily Mail, so scornful of anonymous police sources in some of the paedophile investigations, has accepted Ashcroft’s “evidence” at face value. Jurymen and women in the court of public opinion would do well to treat them all warily.